Hatemail and Critiques from the art community
Contact me - I'd like to hear from you. I'm looking for suggestions of future photo subjects. Let me know if you liked the art. Or if you hated it. I want feedback.
Some comments I've received lately:
"Genius" - R.F.
"bellissimo" - L.R.
"Probably the best fine art taco photography I've seen" - J. H.
"Wow, that's genius!" - S.A.
"I liked the shadowing of the taco." - M.P.
"This made me smile, and feel a little guilty" -Theta
"You are the Orson Welles of the taco photography world and this is your Citizen Kane." -Daniel
"You're photography really taps into new symbolic realms." - JW
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Fine Art Taco Photography
I have always liked tacos. You have to respect the simplicity and ergonomics of the taco. It is what it is.
Many will believe this is a joke; that I'm making the point that anything, when photographed in black and white, looks artistic and interesting.
Please view the photographs and make up your own mind. I believe they speak for themselves.
*update 1* -
I am now offering 8x10 prints suitable for framing for sale here. All proceeds will be used for further photography projects. This would be a perfect gift for the lover of fine art AND tacos.
*update 2* -
Traveling Taco-Art Exhibit: I will be sending my Taco Art around the world. If you would like to display my art in your venue (museum, college, company, etc), please email me with a few details about your organization. Ideally, you'd display the art for a few weeks to a month, and then send it to the next venue on the list. All I ask for is a few photos of the public enjoying my art. Email me if you're interested.
The photographs
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View the entire taco gallery here.
My niche marketing plan:
What's new:
10/25/07 - An email I received from Perry:
I told my girlfriend about your taco art. She's a curatorial intern at the ------ Museum of Art. You'd think she'd recognize fine art when she saw it, and she does like tacos, but she didn't seem to take it seriously enough.
That's probably because I brought it up when she was talking about 'serious' art exhibits with her parents. Not that she has any power there or anything, being an intern and all, but still, it'd have been nice to try and get you in at the -MA.
Thanks very much for trying. Maybe in time she will come to appreciate Taco Art.
10/7/07 - A professed fine art expert told me that a characteristic of Fine Art photography was not only unusual subject matter, or subject matter photographed in an unusual way, but relatively low exposure, and high contrast. Black and White photography, I'm told, is "beautiful" because it naturally captures these characteristics.
Had I known about this relationship earlier - how quality relates to exposure, I would have exploited this fact long ago.
I guess this is how it works:
As you can see, most photographs with "correct" exposure are considered only mediocre quality. Fine Art photographs are typically black/white or underexposed to some extent to make them "interesting". If you plot a bunch of them you come up with a curve like I've drawn above.
You'll notice that at zero exposure - meaning completely black - the quality is zero. Art snobs will tell you that this is because you can't see the subject at all. My guess is that they only started saying this after a bunch of amateurs tried to sell unexposed photos. But we'll never know.
But you'll notice that severely underexposed photos should be of extreme high quality. To test this, I've prepared one of my photos with the exposure that should theoretically give the highest quality attainable:
I am no Fine Art expert, but I think it looks pretty good. You can almost decipher what the subject is, and that seems about perfect. We'll see what the critics say, though.
10/3/07 - I'm in Thailand. Don't worry - taco prints are still available. Also there are no tacos here that I have seen but I did see a "cheese hamburger" on a menu the other day, so who knows.
9/29/07 - No updates in a while, sorry. Lots of things have been happening in the world of Fine Art Taco Photography. Many prints have been sold, and have received a few leads for my traveling taco-art exhibit. I've been getting a lot of emails. In the near future, I'll put together a FAQ.
CollegeHumor linked this site in their Hotlinks - "Weird stuff we found on the Web" section. That's pretty cool.
9/19/07 - Happy Talk Like a Pirate Day. This site was down for a few hours. What happened was the other site hosted on my server (venganza.org) was clogged with traffic because of TLAP day, and the server died. Everything's back up now.
9/15/07 - I received some emails asking for larger prints. I'm having a 20"x30" print made today and we'll see if it looks ok.
9/14/07 - New York Magazine has written about my project on their Grub Street blog..
9/12/07 -I notice a lot of traffic coming from Europe. I didn't know you guys even had tacos. Maybe that's why you're interested?
The blog Tacos, Pianos and Practical Latin talked about this site today. The author, Daniel, sent me an email saying "You are the Orson Welles of the taco photography world and this is your Citizen Kane." Thanks!
BoingBoing'd ! - 9/12/07 11PM
9/11/07 - The popular blog Neat-O-Rama linked here today. Thank you for all the traffic. I am happy that so many people can see my art.
